[omaranto]

You misunderstood the point the author made about erlang-base: it's not that he or she somehow installed Erlang without installing erlang-base, but rather that if in an Ubuntu system you try to run 'erl' before installing any Erlang packages at all, you receive a message telling you something like "to get the erl command install the package 'erlang-base'" and if you go and do that, you don't get the Erlang standard library! The point is that Ubuntu should either suggest 'erlang' instead, or not have all those separate tiny packages in the first place.

[YokoZar]

Ahh, this is just a simple bug in the command-not-found package that makes those recommendations when you type in a missing binary, not an underlying problem with the entire philosophy of splitting pacakges!

[omaranto]

I'm not sure it's really a bug with command-not-found: I think in this case it correctly gives the package containing the erl command, namely erlang-base; the problem is that Ubuntu decided that there should exist an erlang-base package that gives you erl without the standard library.

[dfc]

Nice catch. It did not occur to me that people would run a program without installing it, use command-not-found and/ignore the suggests list when installing a package. As another commenter pointed out this has nothing to do with splitting packages up. Its a toss up between user error or bug in c-n-f.